SoundCloud's Collapse

Worth reading to the end for the deadpan Correction.

I read this article few hours earlier when crawling through the new section. It's a surprisingly interesting piece from Buzzfeed but there's a lot of bashing of the CEO, the CTO and one recently hired senior for label relations (who seem to be really odd).

This is typical: SoundCloud was an iconic company, its founders worshiped and idealized. Once money runs out, people but especially former employees start to backstab, blaspheme and blame loud and clearly. Why not before? Now when everybody is hitting SoundCloud it's easy and risk-free to join the hate. All the NDAs they once signed seem to be gone? To be fired also means fire and forget for them.

I never believed in SoundCloud. The founders did a great job building a huge brand and DNA out of nothing but the business model is by design broken or to put it simply, you just can't do business with music labels.

Btw, where is Fred Wilson? The biggest proponent and investor of SoundCloud who didn't miss an opportunity to tell us that sound is the future stays silent and hasn't commented this tragedy once. A VC just for good times?

EDIT: Why the downvotes? Mind to share your view?

This is BuzzFeed News, which is run semi-independently from BuzzFeed itself and has actually had some decent quality journalism from the start.

Apparently this happened in 2016: http://www.poynter.org/2016/buzzfeed-undergoes-company-wide-...

Their investigations team is especially interesting: https://www.poynter.org/2016/how-buzzfeed-built-an-investiga...

Without reading a word of it, I imagine where it leans.

> According to one former SoundCloud Berlin employee, a lack of direction from Wahlforss, who served as chief technology officer, made things worse, with some engineers going rogue and rebuilding their colleagues’ work in their preferred programming language.

Does this happen at other startups?